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blackbird27's review against another edition
5.0
My second Giraudoux in translation (the third is on my bedside shelf, but I don't know that I'll get to it next; I'm building up quite the library), and I think more successful than Bella at winning me entirely over to Giraudoux's dense, encyclopedic, frivolous, and imagistic prose style. The plot is Robinson Crusoe, except the hero is a young Frenchwoman barely out of boarding-school instead of an industrious Enlightenment-era cipher, and the brittle, allusive pages that cover the shipwreck are possibly one of the high points of the modernist decade's rejection of the Victorian novel's infrastructure of sentiment and description. How she survives for the five years she's stranded alone in the South Pacific is of almost no interest to the narrator (Suzanne herself) -- what she sees, thinks and dreams of is the sum of the book.
I woke up one morning after reading it before sleeping convinced that I had remembered, rather than dreamed, that Evelyn Waugh had once called Giraudoux's novels "bloated fables for Everyman's Library" (he didn't, I checked). It's not an inaccurate put-down, if putting-down is your aim: like his fable-making compatriots La Fontaine or Voltaire, Giraudoux is more interested in illuminating philosophical questions than providing a racketing good story, and like his more contemporary novel-making compatriots Proust or the Goncourts he's more interested in infinitesimally cataloging sensory impressions and the fugitive associations of the mind than in caring whether anything that takes place is particularly plausible. In that sense he's an anti-realist, and his work was championed early on by the Dada crowd, although he stands more alone than not; his only real coeval was the similarly singular Jean Cocteau, who took longer to make a good impression, but is better remembered for his multidisciplinary body work than for his writing qua writing.
At any rate, I'm prepared now to call Suzanne and the Pacific one of the forgotten masterpieces of 1920s fiction. It's been periodically reissued over the years in French, but the 1923 English translation was only vanity-reprinted once, in the 1970s (the edition I read), and the themes it engages with -- European "civilization" versus back-to-nature Pacific "savagery" (there's a criticism of Gauguin and other French Oceania colonizers implicit here); feminine versus masculine ingenuity (cf. Crusoe, but not only); ecological meditations; and all the religious and social implications of pseudo-Edenic living -- are as relevant now as when it was written 95 years ago.
That I kept seeing drawings by the contemporary French fashion and humor cartoonist Charles Martin in my head when I read it was the capper to a week of solid enjoyment in reading.
I woke up one morning after reading it before sleeping convinced that I had remembered, rather than dreamed, that Evelyn Waugh had once called Giraudoux's novels "bloated fables for Everyman's Library" (he didn't, I checked). It's not an inaccurate put-down, if putting-down is your aim: like his fable-making compatriots La Fontaine or Voltaire, Giraudoux is more interested in illuminating philosophical questions than providing a racketing good story, and like his more contemporary novel-making compatriots Proust or the Goncourts he's more interested in infinitesimally cataloging sensory impressions and the fugitive associations of the mind than in caring whether anything that takes place is particularly plausible. In that sense he's an anti-realist, and his work was championed early on by the Dada crowd, although he stands more alone than not; his only real coeval was the similarly singular Jean Cocteau, who took longer to make a good impression, but is better remembered for his multidisciplinary body work than for his writing qua writing.
At any rate, I'm prepared now to call Suzanne and the Pacific one of the forgotten masterpieces of 1920s fiction. It's been periodically reissued over the years in French, but the 1923 English translation was only vanity-reprinted once, in the 1970s (the edition I read), and the themes it engages with -- European "civilization" versus back-to-nature Pacific "savagery" (there's a criticism of Gauguin and other French Oceania colonizers implicit here); feminine versus masculine ingenuity (cf. Crusoe, but not only); ecological meditations; and all the religious and social implications of pseudo-Edenic living -- are as relevant now as when it was written 95 years ago.
That I kept seeing drawings by the contemporary French fashion and humor cartoonist Charles Martin in my head when I read it was the capper to a week of solid enjoyment in reading.
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